Posted on 06/20/2008 8:12:50 AM PDT by kellynla
So asks Newsweek's cover, which features a full-length photo of the prime minister his people voted the greatest Briton of them all.
Quite a tribute, when one realizes Churchill's career coincides with the collapse of the British empire and the fall of his nation from world pre-eminence to third-rate power.
That the Newsweek cover was sparked by my book "Churchill, Hitler and The Unnecessary War" seems apparent, as one of the three essays, by Christopher Hitchens, was a scathing review. Though in places complimentary, Hitchens charmingly concludes: This book "stinks."
Understandable. No Brit can easily concede my central thesis: The Brits kicked away their empire. Through colossal blunders, Britain twice declared war on a Germany that had not attacked her and did not want war with her, fought for 10 bloody years and lost it all.
Unable to face the truth, Hitchens seeks solace in old myths.
We had to stop Prussian militarism in 1914, says Hitchens. "The Kaiser's policy shows that Germany was looking for a chance for war all over the globe."
Nonsense. If the Kaiser were looking for a war he would have found it. But in 1914, he had been in power for 25 years, was deep into middle age but had never fought a war nor seen a battle.
From Waterloo to World War I, Prussia fought three wars, all in one seven-year period, 1864 to 1871. Out of these wars, she acquired two duchies, Schleswig and Holstein, and two provinces, Alsace and Lorraine. By 1914, Germany had not fought a war in two generations.
Does that sound like a nation out to conquer the world?
As for the Kaiser's bellicose support for the Boers, his igniting the Agadir crisis in 1905, his building of a great fleet, his seeking of colonies in Africa, he was only aping the British, whose approbation and friendship he desperately sought all his life and was ever denied.
In every crisis the Kaiser blundered into, including his foolish "blank cheque" to Austria after Serb assassins murdered the heir to the Austrian throne, the Kaiser backed down or was trying to back away when war erupted.
Even Churchill, who before 1914 was charging the Kaiser with seeking "the dominion of the world," conceded, "History should ... acquit William II of having plotted and planned the World War."
What of World War II? Surely, it was necessary to declare war to stop Adolf Hitler from conquering the world and conducting the Holocaust.
Yet consider. Before Britain declared war on him, Hitler never demanded return of any lands lost at Versailles to the West. Northern Schleswig had gone to Denmark in 1919, Eupen and Malmedy had gone to Belgium, Alsace and Lorraine to France.
Why did Hitler not demand these lands back? Because he sought an alliance, or at least friendship, with Great Britain and knew any move on France would mean war with Britain -- a war he never wanted.
If Hitler were out to conquer the world, why did he not build a great fleet? Why did he not demand the French fleet when France surrendered? Germany had to give up its High Seas Fleet in 1918.
Why did he build his own Maginot Line, the Western Wall, in the Rhineland, if he meant all along to invade France?
If he wanted war with the West, why did he offer peace after Poland and offer to end the war, again, after Dunkirk?
That Hitler was a rabid anti-Semite is undeniable. "Mein Kampf" is saturated in anti-Semitism. The Nuremberg Laws confirm it. But for the six years before Britain declared war, there was no Holocaust, and for two years after the war began, there was no Holocaust.
Not until midwinter 1942 was the Wannsee Conference held, where the Final Solution was on the table.
That conference was not convened until Hitler had been halted in Russia, was at war with America and sensed doom was inevitable. Then the trains began to roll.
And why did Hitler invade Russia? This writer quotes Hitler 10 times as saying that only by knocking out Russia could he convince Britain it could not win and must end the war.
Hitchens mocks this view, invoking the Hitler-madman theory.
"Could we have a better definition of derangement and megalomania than the case of a dictator who overrules his own generals and invades Russia in wintertime ... ?"
Christopher, Hitler invaded Russia on June 22.
The Holocaust was not a cause of the war, but a consequence of the war. No war, no Holocaust.
Britain went to war with Germany to save Poland. She did not save Poland. She did lose the empire. And Josef Stalin, whose victims outnumbered those of Hitler 1,000 to one as of September 1939, and who joined Hitler in the rape of Poland, wound up with all of Poland, and all the Christian nations from the Urals to the Elbe.
The British Empire fought, bled and died, and made Eastern and Central Europe safe for Stalinism. No wonder Winston Churchill was so melancholy in old age. No wonder Christopher rails against the book. As T.S. Eliot observed, "Mankind cannot bear much reality."
It sounds terrible to the modern ear, I agree.
Me, I tended to look at being “chosen” like pulling the black bean. All the other souls were smart enough to get the heck out of Dodge when God asked who would be the “Covenent People.”
“I’m “chosen?” You mean I get killed and trampled and hated by the whole world!? Whooppee! Sign me up!”
Not until midwinter 1942 was the Wannsee Conference held, where the Final Solution was on the table.
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Pure lies. The Einsatzgruppen were actively slaughtering Jews in Russia and Poland from the beginning. The only issue was that shooting them was too slow. The camps were just an effort at efficiencies.
That is specious reasoning and you should be ashamed to dabble in it yourself, quite frankly. We have NO WAY of knowing whether or not the Nazis would have refrained from the Holocaust if the war had not started - however, they gave clear indication that they would like to go that way before the war. Take this crap elsewhere.
A ridiculous and sinister claim.
Rabbi Antelman basically (so far as I understand it) believes that the cause of much of the evil of recent centuries is an occult conspiracy among heretics of the great religions. As a Jew he concentrates on the Sabbatians and their successors the Frankists because to him they are the culprits within the Jewish religion, though he also ranks the islamic Sufis as major bad guys.
Alouette: I know the US doesn't have a Chief Rabbinate (though it should, and it should be a sovereign Theocratic entity with full civil authority over all Jews as was the case until a few centuries ago), but the court of which Rabbi Antelman was (or is) Chief Justice is (or was) named the Supreme Rabbinic Court of America. I believe it was at one time headquartered in Baltimore, Md., though my memory could be faulty, and it could be somewhere else, or even nonexistent, by now.
I failed to mention in my previous post perhaps Rabbi Antelman's greatest eccentricities. He believes that subversive elements have influenced Orthodoxy to incorporate heretical elements into the Tefillot (prayers). For example, he says that the phrase which calls 'Af-Beri the "angel of rain" in the annual Prayer for Rain recited on Shemini `Atzeret is heretical (since G-d controls the rain directly, without using an angel) and should be expunged. He claims the beloved Unetanneh Toqef prayer (recited in the 'Ashkenazi rite on the High Holy Days) is also heretical, being based not on the martyrdom of Rabbi `Amnon of Mayence (whom he regards as a myth) but a Sufi martyr of many centuries earlier. To add to the insult, the Sufi was renamed "`Amnon" in the prayer in order to call up the image of `Amnon and Tamar.
He also says that the introduction of the sanctuary lamp in 'Ashkenazi synagogues (and its moving from the wall opposite the tabernacle to directly in front of it in Sefaradi synagogues) was introduced under the influence of "illuminism."
He is controversial in some places because he regards Jonathan Eibeschutz as a Sabbatian heretic who was responsible for teaching immoral acts in cloaked form in his Va'Avo' HaYom 'el Ha`Ayin. Of course, the universally beloved Rabbi Jacob Emden said exactly the same things about Eibeschutz. Emden is a hero to Antelman. And is he not to all Orthodox Jews, even those who reverence Eibeschutz as well?
ok, fair enough
If you believe Lee alone could’ve stopped the Civil War in its tracks by accepting Lincoln’s offer, you’re as delusional as Buchanan.
It's not just specious reasoning - it is deliberate unreason.
The second the Wehrmacht rolled through Poland they were followed by Reinhardt Heydrich's Einsatzgruppen.
An intentional policy of mass murder was not only contemplated but in active performance literally from day one.
Thank you.
Years later I heard a very similar take from a Swedish engineer. Hearing essentially the same thing from two widely separated sources gave it some credence in my mind.
The source you cited says:
"Sometimes a local official chose to assign an unpleasant name. Some people were named Rindkopf (cow's head) or Faulpelz (putrid or lazy hide) or worse because the official felt like playing a joke or didn’t like the person."
This lends some very minimal support to what I was told way back when.
Perhaps some FReeper can chip in with more information here?
BTW, your source also says:
"There is a generally held belief that immigration officers in America arbitrarily assigned names to immigrants. Apparently that is not so. They might have changed spellings to make them more like the English manner of spelling or pronouncing or sometimes shortened them but they did not create totally new names."
I went to HS with a cutie named Katie Anderson. I was astonished when her wedding started to turn into a big Greek festival, she explained that she was full blooded Greek, and that Anderson was the name they gave her family at Ellis Island, because the immigration official thought that [something starting with An- (or Andro?) and going on from there with something very long and nearly totally unpronounceable] wasn't a good name.
He didn't quite create a name out of whole cloth, but he didn't just shorten a long name either!
He means air support.
He properly resigned his commission. We forget today that the concept of loyalty to the country as a whole was one that didn’t come into being until post-war, and even that evolved over time. One’s loyalty was to that of their home state. I’m not going to re-debate the Civil War. My main point was what I said to the other fella, Lee alone couldn’t have stopped the Civil War had he accepted Lincoln’s offer. If he had turned against Virginia, he would’ve been considered the biggest traitor to the South, bar none, and his name would’ve been forever associated with the likes of Benedict Arnold. He knew that and that’s why he did what he did.
More than a few men whom would’ve preferred a different course of action were forced to have to choose sides. Moral superiority was not a province exclusive to the North as both sides had their fair share of wrong-headedness. The North, too, had demogogues, such as Massachusetts’ Charles Sumner. Unfortunately, in two diametrically opposed viewpoints, war is the only solution to reach its ultimate settlement.
I know the immigration officers changed names and spellings. I have cousins who spell their name differently than I do because the officials who filled out the papers of the two original cousins who came here with different spellings of the same name, and the immigrants were afraid to complain, so they just kept their “new” names. Same thing happened on my Mother’s side. Her ancestor was an indentured servant, and when he completed his servitude, his “master” gave him somebody else’s papers with the wrong name on them, so he just kept that name.
BTW, every German youth during that period was a Hitler Youth member, including the best college professor I had, without any choice.
Well if no one else will ask, I’ll bite.
What’s tushilka?
Yeah. This guy was quite reasonable and clear thinking as long as you avoided the topics of Jews or WWII.
He though the wrong side won and once you got him started he wasn’t shy about saying so!
Sounds just like Avigdor Lieberman vis-a-vis the Palestinians.
“I think he meant after the war, the way the State of Israel pursued (is still pursuing?) Nazi war criminals.”
Thanks, that was I want meant.
Since Israel as a nation didn’t exist until after WWII, they went after the Nazis and the Nazis abettors/supporters after the war.
I think that the reason that our classic image of the Holocaust is Auschwitz in 1944 is that there are a lot more survivors and witnesses of that late period of the war than there are of the massacres carried out by the Einsatzgruppen in 1941 or 1942 or the earlier Operation Reinhard death camps, which left almost no survivors.
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